The first tool we need is a recent version of R. At the time of writing, the most recent version is 3.1.0 and that is the version you need to have to use Rcpp11.

Next, we need a C++ compiler that implements the C++11 standard. Current versions of gcc and clang support C++11.

Let's start with Windows. The Rtools distribution ships many tools, including a build of gcc version 4.6.2. This does not give you full C++11 support, but that comes close enough.

This gives you an experimental implementation of C++11, back when it was still called C++0x. In particular this does not include support for C++11 threads or template aliases, but for the most part, you should be able to use Rcpp11 with this compiler suite.

The mingw-w64 project ships more recent builds of gcc.

On OSX, you need to install XCode and its command line tools. On versions of OSX greater than 10.9.3 (Mavericks), you get a version clang that fully supports C++11.

On Linux, it all depends on your distribution. I'd recommend to get the latest available version of gcc (at least 4.8.0).

Next, you need to install Rcpp11. You can either get a stable version from CRAN.

install.packages( "Rcpp11" )

Or a development version from github:

devtools::install_github("Rcpp11/Rcpp11")

The package consists of only header files, it contains no R code and no .cpp files in the src/ directory. It does not even have a src/ directory. Installation should be trivial.

Next, you need the attributes package. This package is not yet on CRAN, so you need a development version, but it is pretty stable and routinely used for our unit tests.

devtools::install_github("Rcpp11/attributes")

Once all this is installed, we can try to compile our first .cpp file with atributes::sourceCpp. Let's put the following code in the test.cpp file:

#include <Rcpp11>

// [[export]]
IntegerVector test(){
    return {1,2,3} ;
}

If everything is installed properly, we should be able to compile the test.cpp file with sourceCpp and use the test function:

attributes::sourceCpp( "test.cpp" )
test()

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